Genometry

by Gardner Dozois

  When B’dikkat cut the head from Mercer’s thigh, he felt the knife grinding against the cartilage which held the head to his own body. He saw the child-face grimace as the head was cut; he felt the far, cool flash of unimportant pain, as B’dikkat dabbed the wound with a corrosive antiseptic which stopped all bleeding immediately.

  The next time it was two legs growing from his chest.

  Then there had been another head beside his own.

  Or was that after the torso and legs, waist to toe-tips, of the little girl which had grown from his side?

  He forgot the order.

  He did not count time.

  Lady Da smiled at him often, but there was no love in this place. She had lost the extra torsos. In between teratologies, she was a pretty and shapely woman; but the nicest thing about their relationship was her whisper to him, repeated some thousands of times, repeated with smiles and hope, “People never live forever.”

  She found this immensely comforting, even though Mercer did not make much sense out of it.

  Thus events occurred, and victims changed in appearance, and new ones arrived. Sometimes B’dikkat took the new ones, resting in the everlasting sleep of their burned-out brains, in a ground-truck to be added to other herds. The bodies in the truck thrashed and bawled without human speech when the dromozoa struck them.

  Finally, Mercer did manage to follow B’dikkat to the door of the cabin. He had to fight the bliss of super-condamine to do it. Only the memory of the previous hurt, bewilderment and perplexity made him sure that if he did not ask B’dikkat when he, Mercer, was happy, the answer would no longer be available when he needed it. Fighting pleasure itself, he begged B’dikkat to check the records and to tell him how long he had been there.

  B’dikkat grudgingly agreed, but he did not come out of the doorway. He spoke through the public address box built into the cabin, and his gigantic voice roared out over the empty plain, so that the pink herd of talking people stirred gently in their happiness and wondered what their friend B’dikkat might be wanting to tell them. When he said it, they thought it exceedingly profound, though none of them understood it, since it was simply the amount of time that Mercer had been on Shayol:

  “Standard years—eighty-four years, seven months, three days, two hours, eleven and one-half minutes. Good luck, fellow.”

  Mercer turned away.

  The secret little corner of his mind, which stayed sane through happiness and pain, made him wonder about B’dikkat. What persuaded the cow-man to remain on Shayol? What kept him happy without super-condamine? Was B’dikkat a crazy slave to his own duty or was he a man who had hopes of going back to his own planet someday, surrounded by a family of little cow-people resembling himself? Mercer, despite his happiness, wept a little at the strange fate of B’dikkat. His own fate he accepted.

  He remembered the last time he had eaten—actual eggs from an actual pan. The dromozoa kept him alive, but he did not know how they did it.

  He staggered back to the group. The Lady Da, naked in the dusty plain, waved a hospitable hand and showed that there was a place for him to sit beside her. There were unclaimed square miles of seating space around them, but he appreciated the kindliness of her gesture nonetheless.

  4

  The years, if they were years, went by. The land of Shayol did not change.

  Sometimes the bubbling sound of geysers came faintly across the plain to the herd of men: those who could talk declared it to be the breathing of Captain Alvarez. There was night and day, but no setting of crops, no change of season, no generations of men. Time stood still for these people, and their load of pleasure was so commingled with the shocks and pains of the dromozoa that the words of the Lady Da took on very remote meaning.

  “People never live forever.”

  Her statement was a hope, not a truth in which they could believe. They did not have the wit to follow the stars in their courses, to exchange names with each other, to harvest the experience of each for the wisdom of all. There was no dream of escape for these people. Though they saw the old-style chemical rockets lift up from the field beyond B’dikkat’s cabin, they did not make plans to hide among the frozen crop of transmuted flesh.

  Far long ago, some other prisoner than one of these had tried to write a letter. His handwriting was on a rock. Mercer read it, and so had a few of the others, but they could not tell which man had done it. Nor did they care.

  The letter, scraped on stone, had been a message home. They could still read the opening: “Once, I was like you, stepping out of my window at the end of day, and letting the winds blow me gently toward the place I lived in. Once, like you, I had one head, two hands, ten fingers on my hands. The front part of my head was called a face, and I could talk with it. Now I can only write, and that only when I get out of pain. Once, like you, I ate foods, drank liquid, had a name. I cannot remember the name I had. You can stand up, you who get this letter. I cannot even stand up. I just wait for the lights to put my food in me molecule by molecule, and to take it out again. Don’t think that I am punished anymore. This place is not a punishment. It is something else.”

  Among the pink herd, none of them ever decided what was “something else.”

  Curiosity had died among them long ago.

  Then came the day of the little people.

  It was a time—not an hour, not a year—a duration somewhere between them—when the Lady Da and Mercer sat wordless with happiness and filled with the joy of super-condamine. They had nothing to say to one another; the drug said all things for them.

  A disagreeable roar from B’dikkat’s cabin made them stir mildly.

  Those two, and one or two others, looked toward the speaker of the public address system.

  The Lady Da brought herself to speak, though the matter was unimportant beyond words. “I do believe,” said she, “that we used to call that the War Alarm.”

  They drowsed back into their happiness.

  A man with two rudimentary heads growing beside his own crawled over to them. All three heads looked very happy, and Mercer thought it delightful of him to appear in such a whimsical shape. Under the pulsing glow of super-condamine, Mercer regretted that he had not used times when his mind was clear to ask him who he had once been. He answered it for them. Forcing his eyelids open by sheer will power, he gave the Lady Da and Mercer the lazy ghost of a military salute and said, “Suzdal, Ma’am and Sir, former cruiser commander. They are sounding the alert. Wish to report that I am . . . I am . . . I am not quite ready for battle.”

  He dropped off to sleep.

  The gentle peremptorinesses of the Lady Da brought his eyes open again.

  “Commander, why are they sounding it here? Why did you come to us?”

  “You, Ma’am, and the gentleman with the ears seem to think best of our group. I thought you might have orders.”

  Mercer looked around for the gentleman with the ears. It was himself. In that time his face was almost wholly obscured with a crop of fresh little ears, but he paid no attention to them, other than expecting that B’dikkat would cut them all off in due course and that the dromozoa would give him something else.

  The noise from the cabin rose to a higher, ear-splitting intensity.

  Among the herd, many people stirred. Some opened their eyes, looked around, murmured. “It’s a noise,” and went back to the happy drowsing with super-condamine.

  The cabin door opened.

  B’dikkat rushed out, without his suit. They had never seen him on the outside without his protective metal suit.

  He rushed up to them, looked wildly around, recognized the Lady Da and Mercer, picked them up, one under each arm, and raced with them back to the cabin. He flung them into the double door. They landed with bone-splitting crashes, and found it amusing to hit the ground so hard. The floor tilted them into the room. Moments later, B’dikkat followed.

  He roared at them, “You’re people, or you were. You understand people; I only obey them. But this I will not
obey. Look at that!”

  Four beautiful human children lay on the floor. The two smallest seemed to be twins, about two years of age. There was a girl of five and a boy of seven or so. All of them had slack eyelids. All of them had thin red lines around their temples and their hair, shaved away, showed how their brains had been removed.

  B’dikkat, heedless of danger from dromozoa, stood beside the Lady Da and Mercer, shouting. “You’re real people. I’m just a cow. I do my duty. My duty does not include this. These are children.”

  The wise, surviving recess of Mercer’s mind registered shock and disbelief. It was hard to sustain the emotion, because the super-condamine washed at his consciousness like a great tide, making everything seem lovely. The forefront of his mind, rich with the drug, told him, “Won’t it be nice to have some children with us!” But the undestroyed interior of his mind, keeping the honor he knew before he came to Shayol, whispered, “This is a crime worse than any crime we have committed! And the Empire has done it.”

  “What have you done?” said the Lady Da. “What can we do?”

  “I tried to call the satellite. When they knew what I was talking about, they cut me off. After all, I’m not people. The head doctor told me to do my work.”

  “Was it Doctor Vomact?” Mercer asked.

  “Vomact?” said B’dikkat. “He died a hundred years ago of old age. No, a new doctor cut me off. I don’t have people-feeling, but I am Earthborn, of Earth blood. I have emotions myself. Pure cattle emotions! This I cannot permit.”

  “What have you done?”

  B’dikkat lifted his eyes to the window. His face was illuminated by a determination which, even beyond the edges of the drug which made them love him, made him seem like the father of this world—responsible, honorable, unselfish.

  He smiled. “They will kill me for it, I think. But I have put in the Galactic Alert—all ships here.”

  The Lady Da, sitting back on the floor, declared, “But that’s only for new invaders! It is a false alarm.” She pulled herself together and rose to her feet. “Can you cut these things off me, right now, in case people come? And get me a dress. And do you have anything which will counteract the effect of the super-condamine?”

  “That’s what I wanted!” cried B’dikkat. “I will not take these children. You give me leadership.”

  There and then, on the floor of the cabin, he trimmed her down to the normal proportions of mankind.

  The corrosive antiseptic rose like smoke in the air of the cabin. Mercer thought it all very dramatic and pleasant, and dropped off in catnaps part of the time. Then he felt B’dikkat trimming him too. B’dikkat opened a long, long drawer and put the specimens in; from the cold in the room it must have been a refrigerated locker.

  He sat them both up against the wall.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “There is no antidote for super-condamine. Who would want one? But I can give you the hypos from my rescue boat. They are supposed to bring a person back, no matter what has happened to that person out in space.”

  There was a whining over the cabin roof. B’dikkat knocked a window out with his fist, stuck his head out of the window and looked up. “Come on in,” he shouted.

  There was the thud of a landing craft touching ground quickly. Doors whirred. Mercer wondered, mildly, why people dared to land on Shayol. When they came in he saw that they were not people; they were Customs Robots, who could travel at velocities which people could never match. One wore the insigne of an inspector.

  “Where are the invaders?”

  “There are no—” began B’dikkat.

  The Lady Da, imperial in her posture though she was completely nude, said in a voice of complete clarity, “I am a former Empress, the Lady Da. Do you know me?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the robot inspector. He looked as uncomfortable as a robot could look. The drug made Mercer think that it would be nice to have robots for company, out on the surface of Shayol.

  “I declare this Top Emergency, in the ancient words. Do you understand? Connect me with the Instrumentality.”

  “We can’t—” said the Inspector.

  “You can ask,” said the Lady Da.

  The inspector complied.

  The Lady Da turned to B’dikkat. “Give Mercer and me those shots now. Then put us outside the door so the dromozoa can repair these scars. Bring us in as soon as a connection is made. Wrap us in cloth if you do not have clothes for us. Mercer can stand the pain.”

  “Yes,” said B’dikkat, keeping his eyes away from the four soft children and their collapsed eyes.

  The injection burned like no fire ever had. It must have been capable of fighting the super-condamine, because B’dikkat put them through the open window, so as to save time going through the door. The dromozoa, sensing that they needed repair, flashed upon them. This time the super-condamine had something else fighting it.

  Mercer did not scream but he lay against the wall and wept for ten thousand years; in objective time, it must have been several hours.

  The Customs robots were taking pictures. The dromozoa were flashing against them too, sometimes in whole swarms, but nothing happened.

  Mercer heard the voice of the communicator inside the cabin calling loudly for B’dikkat. “Surgery Satellite calling Shayol. B’dikkat, get on the line!”

  He obviously was not replying.

  There were soft cries coming from the other communicator, the one which the customs officials had brought into the room. Mercer was sure that the eye-machine was on and that people in other worlds were looking at Shayol for the first time.

  B’dikkat came through the door. He had torn navigation charts out of his lifeboat. With these he cloaked them.

  Mercer noted that the Lady Da changed the arrangement of the cloak in a few minor ways and suddenly looked like a person of great importance.

  They re-entered the cabin door.

  B’dikkat whispered, as if filled with awe, “The Instrumentality has been reached, and a lord of the Instrumentality is about to talk to you.”

  There was nothing for Mercer to do, so he sat back in a corner of the room and watched. The Lady Da, her skin healed, stood pale and nervous in the middle of the floor.

  The room filled with an odorless intangible smoke. The smoke clouded. The full communicator was on.

  A human figure appeared. A woman, dressed in a uniform of radically conservative cut, faced the Lady Da.

  “This is Shayol. You are the Lady Da. You called me.”

  The Lady Da pointed to the children on the floor. “This must not happen,” she said. “This is a place of punishments, agreed upon between the Instrumentality and the Empire. No one said anything about children.”

  The woman on the screen looked down at the children.

  “This is the work of insane people!” she cried.

  She looked accusingly at the Lady Da, “Are you imperial?”

  “I was an Empress, madam,” said the Lady Da.

  “And you permit this!”

  “Permit it?” cried the Lady Da. “I had nothing to do with it.” Her eyes widened. “I am a prisoner here myself. Don’t you understand?”

  The image-woman snapped, “No, I don’t.”

  “I,” said the Lady Da, “am a specimen. Look at the herd out there. I came from them a few hours ago.”

  “Adjust me,” said the image-woman to B’dikkat. “Let me see that herd.”

  Her body, standing upright, soared through the wall in a flashing arc and was placed in the very center of the herd.

  The Lady Da and Mercer watched her. They saw even the image lose its stiffness and dignity. The image-woman waved an arm to show that she should be brought back into the cabin. B’dikkat tuned her back into the room.

  “I owe you an apology,” said the image. “I am the Lady Johanna Gnade, one of the lords of the Instrumentality.”

  Mercer bowed, lost his balance and had to scramble up from the floor. The Lady Da acknowledged the introducti
on with a royal nod.

  The two women looked at each other.

  “You will investigate,” said the Lady Da, “and when you have investigated, please put us all to death. You know about the drug?”

  “Don’t mention it,” said B’dikkat, “don’t even say the name into a communicator. It is a secret of the Instrumentality!”

  “I am the Instrumentality,” said the Lady Johanna. “Are you in pain? I did not think that any of you were alive. I had heard of the surgery banks on your off-limits planet, but I thought that robots tended parts of people and sent up the new grafts by rocket. Are there any people with you? Who is in charge? Who did this to the children?”

  B’dikkat stepped in front of the image. He did not bow. “I’m in charge.”

  “You’re underpeople!” cried the Lady Johanna. “You’re a cow!”

  “A bull, Ma’am. My family is frozen back on Earth itself, and with a thousand years’ service I am earning their freedom and my own. Your other questions, Ma’am. I do all the work. The dromozoa do not affect me much, though I have to cut a part off myself now and then. I throw those away. They don’t go into the bank. Do you know the secret of this place?”

  The Lady Johanna talked to someone behind her on another world. Then she looked at B’dikkat and commanded, “Just don’t name the drug or talk too much about it. Tell me the rest.”

  “We have,” said B’dikkat very formally, “thirteen hundred and twenty-one people who can still be counted on to supply parts when the dromozoa implant them. There are about seven hundred more, including Go-Captain Alvarez, who have been so thoroughly absorbed by the planet that it is no use trimming them. The Empire set up this place as a point of uttermost punishment. But the Instrumentality gave secret orders for medicine—” he accented the word strangely, meaning super-condamine—“to be issued so that the punishment would be counteracted. The Empire supplies our convicts. The Instrumentality distributes the surgical material.”